Python rocks

[Alex Martelli]

Mark Carter <me at privacy.net> wrote:

> Alex Martelli wrote:
> > Mark Carter <me at privacy.net> wrote:
> 
> > Yes, GMP is a pain to compile (especially on Mac OS X), but I believe
> 
> > Just mentioning this in case you want to give Scheme another chance
> 
> Thanks. I'll take a look at it.

You're welcome.

> I think I've decided to finish off my little in project in Python first,
> though. I'd like to actually get it done (!). I may well decide to 
> reimplement bits in either Scheme, or I might try my hand at Forth. My
> app will be small enough to permit re-writes.

Excellent situation to play around with many languages, then.  If your
app can run on dotNET or Mono, you might also want to try Boo, a
language somewhat inspired by Python but with a different approach to
typing (based on type-inferencing, with an explicit 'duck' type for
those rare cases in which you really _want_ a single variable to take on
values of heterogeneous types during execution).

> I had actually done a small 3-month Java project professionally about 7
> years ago. Can't say I was too impressed. IMO, it was too verbose, I'm
> not an OO fanatic, and some immutable strings turned out to be not quite
> as immutable as I expected.

Nolo contendere on the verbosity and the need to stuff _every_thing into
a class,  but the non-immutable-strings looks like a serious bug in
whatever JVM you were using at the time.  Anyway, what's impressive with
Java today is not the language (maybe a bit better than it was 7 years
ago but still substantially Java:-), it's the array of excellent tools,
libraries and frameworks grown around it; Java's standard library has
arguably surpassed Python's, and third-party offerings for Java are
really great.

 
> I had a brief toy around with Java using Xcode very recently, and I was

Not the best IDE for Java, btw -- Apple doesn't seem to like Java all
that much any more, and it looks to me like it's backpedaling on Java's
integration in MacOSX (in favor of Python, Ruby, etc).  BTW, ObjectiveC
is another language worth trying (though its non-Apple implementations
lag far, far behind, alas).  Eclipse is probably "the" Java IDE nowadays
(and it's free, cross-platform, and all).

> able to figure out how to download webpages easy enough (I do this to
> scrape stock quotes). I felt fairly confident that I could achieve what
> I wanted in Java, even though I'm fairly raw with it. I started from a
> default project using Xcode, and it seemed to generate a lot of base 
> code. I quickly abandoned the Java idea, as I'm not gunning to be a Java
> developer, and Python seems to do what I want without fuss.
> 
> I think that's the key to Python. You can do what you want without fuss,
> and it's copiously documented.

Yes, excellent points.  Although I have a long-time fascination with
many programming languages, Python does still stand out from the crowd
in enabling me to get any given app done "without fuss"!-)


Alex